


Elves Among Enemies

by lucyrne (theungenue)



Category: Soul Eater, World of Warcraft
Genre: Blood Elf/Night Elf - Freeform, F/F, Not exact lore, World of Warcraft!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 21:37:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6537184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theungenue/pseuds/lucyrne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsubaki is a night elf infiltrating the hostile Stranglethorn Vale to rescue Black Star, her gnomish friend and partner. Along the way, she stumbles upon two blood elf sisters with a mysterious agenda. Maybe they'll become allies. Maybe they'll become enemies. Or maybe Tsubaki will find a love deeper and more dangerous than she ever believed possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Elves Among Enemies

**Author's Note:**

> Another addition to the TsuLiz archive! This should be only three chapters long. I don't have a posting schedule, so please bear with me. 
> 
> Please note that the WoW lore isn't 100% accurate, and this was not betaed. You've been warned.

Blending into the jungle is far less seamless than in the forest back home, or even in the nearby swamps. This place, Stranglethorn, is too wild, too chaotic in its growth and noise, and its endless clamoring makes it hard for her to think. The cacophony is so loud that she almost walks straight into the enemy.

Tsubaki steps off the dirt road, presses her back against a knotted tree trunk, and erases her breath. Her cloak activates, and she blends in with the mossy bark. A squad of brightly colored jungle trolls bickering amongst each other in a language she does not understand pass by, unaware that she is watching them from mere feet away. They might smell her, but Tsubaki knows she won’t be detected so long as she keeps entirely still.

When the hooting laughter of trolls fades into the distance, she breathes a shaky sigh of relief and touches the dark ponytail draped across her left shoulder. 

A smart night elf wouldn’t travel alone deep into hostile territory, but Tsubaki didn’t get to where she is by playing it safe or smart. Besides, she is not going to abandon Black Star, not when she has come so far.

She walks for a long while, maneuvering between trees and melting into shadows when convenient, when the sounds of a fight a hundred or so feet from the path captures her attention. Tsubaki’s bare feet are gentle feathers as she moves closer to witness the scene, curious, and she finds two blonde women with figures too small to be trolls are locked in combat with Venture Company mercenaries. 

Tsubaki almost runs into the fight--those filthy Venture Company cronies had it coming _\--_ but stops when she sees that the people they are fighting have upright, pointed ears. _Blood elves._

She sheaths her knife. If she were to reveal her position to save anyone, it wouldn’t be for a pair of gutless blood elves.

But the fight itself is still intriguing enough to observe from afar. Tsu had never seen a blood elf up close before, and she is shocked at how they fight like dancers, twirling away from a mercenary's lunge with ease and spring back with their own. The short one with the cropped hair fights with her fists and steals a blunderbuss right out of the hands of a furious goblin. Her partner--a tall, lithe elf with long golden hair tucked behind her ears--uses dual daggers to swiftly take out her enemies before they even make their first blow.

Her interest wanes as it becomes clear that the blood elves are winning. It would do no good to be discovered by these beautiful, deadly elves fresh from a fight. She turns to leave, but the harsh feedback of a blunderbuss bullet striking flesh causes Tsubaki to pause.

In the scuffle, the goblin reclaimed his gun long enough to use it. The shorter blood elf now lies on the ground, a stain of red blooming on her shirt. The tall blood elf screams with rage and horror.

The blood elf language, Thalassian, is an offshoot of her own language, Darnassian. While they are by no means identical, they do share a word Tsubaki would recognize anywhere.

“ _Sister!”_ she screams with an pained inflection so eerily similar to Masamune that Tsubaki goes completely numb. 

A woman possessed, the elf dispatches of the Venture Company goblin and his henchmen with a few deadly strikes. She seemed to be enjoying the fight before this moment, but now the blood elf doesn’t spare a single glance at her vanquished enemies. With a face fraught with fear, she kneels by the other elf--her _sister--_ and begins murmuring more in Thalassian. 

Tsubaki doesn’t know what possesses her to step forward, breaking her stealth and revealing herself to all. The blood elf’s ears twitch in her direction-- _She sensed me,_ Tsubaki realizes--and her blonde hair flips over her shoulder as she seeks out her presence.

For some reason, all blood elves have a sickly green haze covering their eyes. Cradling her bleeding sister in her lap, this particular blood elf’s eyes could burn the entire jungle down with their intensity. Tsubaki steps forward, and the blood elf bares her teeth.

“Get back!” she sneers in perfect Common.

Tsubaki is startled that the language barrier has crumbled so easily. What business does this blood elf have speaking the _Alliance’s_ main tongue? The injured elf gasps in pain and coughs up blood on her sister’s shirt. There isn’t much time.

“I’m a priest,” Tsubaki explains. “I can heal your sister with my magic, if you let me.”

A blonde hair escapes from behind the blood elf’s ear, and she appraises Tsubaki with suspicion. “Why?” she finally asks.

If only Tsubaki knew the answer to that question. She settles for a neutral answer. “I don’t like the Venture Company either, and I’d hate to seem them win.”

Healing isn’t exactly Tsubaki’s forte. She’s a shadow priest, a spellcaster who can manipulate darkness and turn it against her enemies, but she has a few good healing spells in her arsenal to help allies recover from their wounds. Tsubaki has plenty of mana available to save this young elf’s life, faction alliances be damned.

She kneels by the blood elf sisters, but pauses. “What’s her name?” Tsubaki asks. 

“Patty,” the blood elf answers without hesitation. That doesn’t sound very much like an elf’s name. Tsubaki wonders absently if it’s a nickname, or even an alias. 

Masamune once criticized Tsubaki’s habit to ask the names of the individuals she traveled with, the people she helped. Putting names to faces makes such people difficult to abandon and impossible to forget. But Tsubaki doesn’t believe crossing paths and vanishing without a trace. Even a dying blood elf deserves to be called by her name.

Tsubaki’s entire body is a lightning rod. Her hands hover over the elf’s wounds while she channels the magic, knitting flesh black together and clotting blood. Patty is coughing when Tsubaki begins, but as the magic does its works the elf stops heaving and rasping and starts to calm. Her sister, too, relaxes as Patty’s condition improves in a matter of minutes. Crying no longer, the elder blood elf strokes her sister’s hair and speaks Thalassian under her breath.

Patty is truly a model patient. When Tsubaki heals Black Star, he can’t keep still or stop talking long enough for her to do her work. But they manage, because Black Star is in constant need of medical attention, and Tsubaki has already pledged to always be there when he needed it.

The magic crackling at her fingertips fades, and Tsubaki withdraws her hands quickly. These were blood elves after all, and despite her charity she isn’t one to let her guard down to quickly. Her worries are unwarranted. The sisters don’t really notice her immediately after the healing is done, choosing instead to embrace and admonish each other for eluding death too closely. They don’t even thank her.

Feeling that she has overstayed her welcome, Tsubaki rises and melts back into the forest, allowing the shadows to consume her and the blood elf sisters to become a mere footnote in her long journey.

That night, it’s hard to find a tree branch comfortable or safe enough to sleep in. Eventually Tsubaki finds a cozy hollow sheltered from the tropical shower and curls up. She is lulled to sleep by the patter of raindrops, the absent chatter of birds and the whispers of the wind.

There are more hushed whispers when Tsubaki slowly wakes the next day, but they aren’t the wind. They are soft chuckles in a tongue similar to her own, but not quite…

She is jolted from sleep so quickly that she nearly falls from her perch. 

The two blood elves, too, are startled by Tsubaki’s sudden movement and flail their arms to stop themselves from pitching forward and hurtling to the jungle floor. 

They are here, the two sisters she helped, _they are here._ She doesn’t understand how they could have found her hiding place while she was asleep; after all, Tsubaki became stealthed when she grew still. 

Unless they had followed her from the clearing and watched her scale the tree, stalked her like hunters while she was none the wiser.

Tsubaki feels like cornered animal. “What do you want?” she demands, but half her mind is already strategizing an escape. Her knife is wedged behind her, but if need be she could wrench it free and defend herself. A shadow bolt could easily send them falling to their deaths at well. 

Patty exchanges a glance with her older sister and giggles. The older elf smirks. “Relax, we’re not here to start anything,” she says. To prove her point, the elf extracts her daggers from her belt and stabs them into the tree. “See, unarmed!” She then whispers in Thalassian to her sister, who then offers up the blunderbuss they stole. 

Tsubaki takes the clumsy looking gun, though she hasn’t the slightest idea of how to use it. She doesn’t really view the needless stabbing of trees as a sign of peace, but at least she’s the only one with a weapon. “Why did you follow me?” she asks.

“Listen,” the elder blood elf says. “You saved our asses back there. We want to settle up.”

Tsubaki studied their faces. “Settle...up?”

“Yeah! You did something good for us, so we’ll do something good for you. See, Patty and I don’t like to have our lives indebted to anyone. If we settle up now, we can go our separate ways no problem.”

She blinks. They must not understand the concept of the good samaritan, or selflessness. Perhaps this is typical behavior for blood elves, to demand payment for good deeds. Or maybe it is their trade to exchange dangerous favors, like sell swords. “Are you mercenaries?” Tsubaki ventures.

Both blood elves laugh as if she had just told them a tree joke. “No, but for you?” the elder elf says with coy twist of her lips. “We’re anything you want us to be.”

There is a husky edge to the elf’s voice, one that causes a strange, delightful warmth to pool at the bottom of Tsubaki’s stomach. “What’s your name?” 

“Liz,” the elf answers as she brushes a stray hair behind her ears. “You know Patty; sorry, she can’t speak Common. And yourself?” 

Her name rolls of her tongue without thought. Perhaps Masamune was right. Perhaps she is too trusting. 

“Alright,” Tsubaki agrees. “There’s only one thing I need help for--rescuing my friend.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment and tell me what you think.


End file.
